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Is it an art or a science?
Does it need to be one or the other?
More one than the other?
more true? more useful? more real?
Are they competing for our allegiance?
our vote? our support?

No! They are a meal best served together.
A complement, one to the other.
They taste better together.
one seasons. the other fuels.
one builds. the other displays.
one means. the other gives meaning.
one constructs. the other creates.

All in one.
I am a scientist-artist.
or am I an artist-scientist?
Today I feel more like the second,
But tomorrow, or later today,
I may feel differently.

Like this:

Journalism reports yesterday’s news.
Like the weather,
it needs no re-cap.
No sense keeping that around.

Fiction tells a good story.
Entertaining, but unless
those characters make a home with us,
one and done.

yet…

Poetry bears telling and re-telling,
reading and re-reading.
Poems speak newness,
reading into us, as we are new.
The one we are (the me who reads)
is new, with each reading.

Yesterday’s poem
holds no sway over today’s me.
Perhaps, a look and see
at how it affected me.
How I landed there. then.

But today lifts off into a new wind,
under new weather conditions.
Today the poem is a completely new flight.
New flight plan, same pilot.

There is no quenching living words,
they continue to speak:
to draw the heart out
to fill the soul up
to still, no activate, no ignite, no…
distill … can’t make up my own mind,
must let it make itself.

These are powerful words that propel me:
to places I’d never go otherwise,
with people I’d never meet otherwise,
except
that I came to the poem,
and it met me there
but didn’t leave me there,
didn’t leave me at all.
It stayed.

What is a poet
but one who lives a life that speaks?
Your life speaks.
It’s poetry
as you write it —
see how it changes you,
as you write
and they,
as they read.